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extrajudicial murder

Venezuela Under Siege: A Hundred Deaths At Sea; Hundreds Of Thousands By Sanctions

Most of the world looks on in disbelief at the now-routine murders on the high seas off Venezuela’s coast – serial killings that the newly minted War Department calls Operation Southern Spear. On October 31, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk condemned the attacks, saying that the “mounting human costs are unacceptable.” The People’s Social Summit in Colombia (November 8-9) excoriated Washington. Four days later in Caracas, a meeting of jurists from 35 countries denounced the “homicidal rampage.” The Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild charged “egregious war crimes and violations of international human rights, maritime, and military law.”

Chaos: The Trump Doctrine For Latin America

The US, under Trump, is unapologetically an empire operating without pretense. International law is for losers. A newly minted War Department, deploying the most lethal killing machine in world history, need not hide behind the sham of promoting democracy. Recall that in 2023 Trump boasted: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil.” As CEO of the capitalist bloc, Trump’s mission is not about to be restrained by respect for sovereignty. There is only one inviolate global sovereign; all others are subalterns. Venezuela – with our oil under its soil – is now in the crosshairs of the empire.

United States Military Executes Five More Civilians

The US military has carried out two more lethal strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific this week, executing five civilians and bringing its total number of extrajudicial killings in the region to 69. On Thursday, November 6, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced a deadly attack on a small boat in the Caribbean that resulted in three deaths. This follows his announcement on Wednesday, November 5, of another strike that killed two individuals. “Today, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War carried out a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization,” Hegseth wrote on social media. He used the same template to confess to these crimes in both reports.

US Repatriates Survivors Of Its Latest Boat Attack In The Caribbean

For the first time since the US began extrajudicially bombing boats in Venezuelan waters this year,  a US military attack did not result in the deaths of all crew members. It was reported that there were two survivors after the bombing of what the US called a “drug boat” without providing evidence. The incident comes amid an ongoing US military escalation in the Caribbean targeting Venezuela, under the guise of a supposed anti-drugs operation. The illegal US military actions in the international waters close to Venezuela, which include blowing up of civilian boats, have left almost 30 people dead in since early September, with no evidence presented of the victims’ alleged ties to drug trafficking. These actions are part of a U.S. military expansion in the southern Caribbean, with destroyers, F-35 fighter jets, a nuclear submarine, and some 10,000 troops deployed.

Trump Announces Second Summary Execution Of Venezuelans

US President Donald Trump announced on his social media platform, Truth Social, Monday, a second “kinetic strike” against a stalled small boat allegedly carrying illegal drugs from Venezuela. In the announcement, the US ruler acknowledged the summary execution of three unidentified male Venezuelan civilians. The statement coincided with the release of an extremely blurry video by the US secretary of war. The video shows a stalled boat displaying no signs of violence before being obliterated by an explosion. The video lacked the visual sharpness and information about the date or location necessary for a fair analysis of the incident, similar to the video from a first execution reported on September 2.

Syria: Over 3,000 Extrajudicial Executions Reported Since Sharaa’s Rise To Power

In the nine months since former Al-Qaeda commander Ahmad al-Sharaa took power in Syria, over 3,000 people have been extrajudicially executed by Syrian security forces and affiliated armed factions, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported on 7 September. Between 8 December of last year and 6 September, SOHR documented the deaths of 10,672 people across the country in acts of violence and violations by local and foreign parties, including 3,020 people who were extrajudicially executed. “The fall of the Assad regime also coincided with unprecedented security chaos in all Syrian areas,” SOHR noted, resulting in the proliferation of “assassinations and political and sectarian-based massacres.”

Eric Adams And Daniel Penny Make Black People The Face Of Crime

Millions of people in the United States are de facto deputies who can be asked at a moment’s notice to carry out what is considered the most important job in the nation, keeping Black people under physical control. The most recent case brought to public attention was that of Daniel Penny, a white man who put an emotionally disturbed Black man, Jordan Neely, in a chokehold on a New York City subway. Neely died after the assault and Penny was recently acquitted of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. What followed was a predictable and righteous reaction of outrage at the obvious racist injustice.

Legal Experts Criticize Biden For Praising Israel’s Killing Of Nasrallah

US President Joe Biden issued a statement praising Israel for the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, calling it “a measure of justice” for the victims of Hezbollah’s actions, including Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians. The assassination, carried out by Israeli airstrikes, has killed dozens of civilians in addition to Nasrallah and threatens a full-scale regional war. The US statement has sparked sharp criticism by legal experts who argue that the endorsement of extrajudicial killings undermines international law. Legal scholars and human rights advocates have expressed concern over Biden’s framing of the operation, calling it a dangerous precedent that disregards the rule of law.

The Death Squads Hunting Environmental Defenders

Before the day’s light had begun to dim, Brandon Lee picked up his phone and texted Sister Genny. ​“Even until now,” he told the nun, ​“I feel like I’m being watched.” It was Tuesday, August 6, 2019, and the habagat season was pulling tropical storms across the mountains of the Cordillera, the rural interior of the Philippine island of Luzon. In Lee’s home province of Ifugao, the threat of a deluge had passed, leaving behind leaden skies and the sticky heat of the wet season. For a week, after a fraught decision made with his wife, Bernice, Lee had hardly left their home in the municipality of Lagawe. He no longer went to work at the office down the road, no longer walked his niece and daughter to school, no longer went anywhere on foot.

Biden’s Assassination Of al-Qaeda Leader Ayman al-Zawahiri Was Illegal

President Joe Biden’s assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan was illegal under both U.S. and international law. After the CIA drone strike killed Zawahiri on August 2, Biden declared, “People around the world no longer need to fear the vicious and determined killer.” What we should fear instead is the dangerous precedent set by Biden’s unlawful extrajudicial execution. In addition to being illegal, the killing of Zawahiri also occurred in a moment when the United Nations had already determined that people in the U.S. had little to fear from him. As a United Nations report released in July concluded, “Al Qaeda is not viewed as posing an immediate international threat from its safe haven in Afghanistan because it lacks an external operational capability and does not currently wish to cause the Taliban international difficulty or embarrassment.”

Experts Detail Deadly Consequences Of US Drone Strikes To Senate

Experts on the conduct and consequences of U.S. drone strikes delivered harrowing testimony Wednesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on two decades of aerial bombardment during the so-called War on Terror.  "Our nation is at a turning point," Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said upon opening the hearing. "In the months after 9/11 we strayed from our values, engaging in torture and indefinite detention at Guantánamo, which continues." "We also began conducting lethal strikes in unprecedented ways," he continued, later acknowledging the tens of thousands of men, women, and children killed U.S. airstrikes in at least half a dozen nations over the past 20-plus years. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the committee, was dismissive of the proceeding, instead expressing concern for "the growing spike in violent crime, including murders and attacks on police" in the United States.

Why I Support An International Treaty To Ban Weaponized Drones And Drone Surveillance

At a time in my life when I barely knew drones existed, a young Lebanese mother mourning the death of her six-year-old daughter, Zainab, helped me understand how monitoring by drones terrified her and her neighbors. It was the summer of 2006, during a war referred to as the Israeli-Hezbollah war. On July 30th, around 1:00 a.m., Israeli warplanes fired missiles at buildings in Qana, Lebanon, a small village in southern Lebanon. One missile, a bunker buster supplied by the U.S. corporation Raytheon, caused a three-story building to collapse, killing an extended family of 27 people. Fifteen of them were children.  Two weeks later, with a team of international observers, I visited Qana because of reports of a massacre there.

BAP Calls On United Nations To Address U.S. Human Rights Crisis

The extrajudicial murders of African/Black people, such as Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, by agents of the U.S. government and armed civilians have sparked urban rebellions in cities across the United States. Yet these murders cannot be understood outside of the context of the U.S. state’s ongoing assault on the human rights of African/Black people. U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweet demanding lethal violence—“...when the looting starts, the shooting starts...”—requires the United Nations to intervene. Trump’s threat comes as the U.S. state has tragically failed during the COVID-19 pandemic to recognize and protect the human right to health of poor and working-class people, including Africans and undocumented migrants.
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